Remember "Baghdad Bob," Saddam Hussein's information minister?
During the Iraq war, as the cameras showed U.S. tanks rolling through Baghdad, he
took to the airwaves to assure his fellow Iraqis that not a single enemy tank
had penetrated the city's defenses.

As it happens, "Bob," whose real name was Muhammad Said
al-Sahhaf, was a long-time expert in manufacturing absurd lies for domestic
consumption. Already in the early 70s, in his role as director of Iraqi Radio
and Television, he had produced a list of "legitimate" Iraqi songs by
the magical means of transforming music that had been composed by Jews into
"traditional folk songs."

Among the illustrious composers and musicians thus erased from Iraqi
history were two brothers: Salah (1908-1986) and Daoud (1910-1976) al-Kuwaiti.
An integral part of Baghdad's artistic scene during the 1930s and 40s, the
al-Kuwaiti brothers wrote music for King Faisal's 1936 coronation ceremony and
headed the Iraqi radio orchestra. Their songs, performed by leading Arab
vocalists like Um-Kultum and Muhammad Abdel-Wahab, were popular throughout the
Arab world.

In 1951, the al-Kuwaiti brothers were among the 120,000 Jews forced to
flee Iraq for Israel, leaving their wealth and prestige behind. When they
arrived in the reborn Jewish state, a small country straining under a doubling
of its population in the first few years after independence, they were placed
with the rest of the Iraqi Jewish refugees in a temporary tent camp.

If the change in physical circumstances was extreme, the cultural
transition was no less difficult. In Iraq the brothers had belonged to the
elite; in Israel they were relatively unknown. Moreover, the regnant cultural
ethos in those early decades of state-building called for fashioning a
"new Jew" by "negating the Diaspora"; the Diaspora emphatically
included the world with which the music of the al-Kuwaitis was associated.
Worse still, that music was by definition identified with the culture of
Israel's arch-enemies.

As a consequence, and even though the al-Kuwaitis continued to perform
for Voice of Israel broadcasts in Arabic, their work was relegated to a musical
ghetto. Compounding the humiliation was the fact that on Iraqi and Arab radio,
thanks to "Baghdad Bob," credit for their songs was now being
assigned to other artists. In these and other ways, the al-Kuwaitis'
experience in Israel was representative of the fate of many in that
transitional generation, marginalized from within and erased from without,
their culture lost somewhere in-between.

By the end of his career, Daoud al-Kuwaiti had become so discouraged
that he forbade his children to become musicians. Although they
themselves dutifully complied with their father's wishes, Daoud's grandson,
born in 1977 and named for his illustrious grandfather, did not—and therein
lies the second half of the story.

From an early age, it was clear that David (Dudu) Tassa had been blessed
with his grandfather's musical talent. Young Tassa released his first album
when he was only thirteen, and within a few years had developed into an
accomplished vocalist and guitarist, one of those rare artists appreciated by
critics, the public, and fellow musicians.

Tassa's standard sound is a mixture of rock and soul sustained by a
sophisticated pop sensibility. But he also knows his way around classic Zionist anthems. And now, on his
recently released and acclaimed eighth disc, Dudu Tassa and the
Kuwaitis, he has further pushed the boundaries of his repertoire by
reinterpreting songs written by his grandfather and great-uncle.

That is no easy task. As Tassa writes in the album's liner notes, even
though he grew up with Arabic songs in his home, his professional diet was
Western popular music, and the two vocabularies are very different. Even more
difficult to digest were the al-Kuwaitis' lyrics, full of typically Iraqi
"pathos and drama." Only slowly did Tassa learn to appreciate the
brothers' literary and musical depth. In the end, he re-arranged the originals,
adding Western rhythms and instrumental colors (there are no guitars in Arab
music). The album, performed entirely in Arabic, is fittingly dedicated
"to all of the musicians who brought [to Israel] . . . a magnificent
culture."

On one level, Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis represents a
ground-breaking experiment in musical sound, dubbed by one critic "Iraq
'n' roll." But the sound is also a poignant one—the sound of a grandson
getting to know the grandfather he never met—and it embodies, as well, an act
of recovery, bringing back into the musical mainstream the work of two
musicians who were forgotten in the twists and turns of history.

Nor is that all. Melding the old and the new, Tassa's interpretation of
the original Iraqi sound is an exercise in generational bridge-building,
reflecting an increasingly common desire among many Israelis to explore the
cultures their grandparents were compelled to set aside as part of their
absorption process. Not Ben-Gurion's "negation of the
Diaspora," this is rather an "ingathering of the exiles," an
ingathering that includes the cultures of the exiles.

Perhaps most significantly, Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis can
be seen as an expression of Israeli cultural self-confidence—of liberation from
the idea that Western styles are the sole criterion of good music. Israel is,
after all, the place where Jewish communities have come together from all over
the world, and it is only natural that its music should reflect the resulting
synthesis. That the Arabic language is a very large component of Israel's
cultural heritage, the medium in which millions of Jews have thought, felt, and
created, is one of the ironies forthrightly embraced in Dudu Tassa and
the Kuwaitis. Among its many other virtues, the album reminds us that
"the language of the enemy" is also the language of a towering
medieval philosopher like Maimonides and of modern Jewish artists like the
brothers al-Kuwaiti.